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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

Apple criticism is going the same way as the "three topics to avoid" (religion, politics, global warming).

I mean, I am an Apple fan, but some of the blind fanboyism you see in other fans is... well... insane!

I see this from Android fanboys too, though. Apple vs. Google (or iPhone vs. Android) looks to me like those endless religion wars on the best programming language, Vim vs. Emacs and so on.

Blind fanboyism has always been there, on any side of any competition. Could be that it is just natural (which does not mean it has to be forgiven).

Blind fanboyism has always been there, on any side of any competition. Could be that it is just natural?

Yes, it's natural. It's how we organized ourselves into tribes for mutual defense in the Stone Age. Noam Chomsky calls it "irrational jingoism." It's also how countries get people to die for them in war and how sports teams market themselves.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm

What's worse than fanboyism is blind hatred by people who never used a product (or did not even held it in own hands). Alas, this seems to happen more on topics related to Apple. The second worst is labeling everyone "fanboy" without any thought.

>I see this from Android fanboys too

Or google fanboys in general. Personally I find google fanboys the most annoying at the moment. Perl fanboys used to be the most annoying but there aren't many of those left thankfully.

Yes, true. But that's true of anything on the internet; I've even run into a pretty vitriolic debate over whether an E6400 was any better than an E6200 overclocked :)

But I do think that there is a particularly strong fanboyism attitude where Apple is concerned. People will jump down your throat at even the slightest "indiscretion", and make it a point of commenting to tell you you are an idiot.

etc.

Apple fanboys are by far the most annoying, in my experience.

I think every "community" has the same problems, particularly when the popularity rises. You got people trying to do stuff the "those guy over there way" instead of the "community way". Linux, OS X, and OpenBSD all have had this. Criticizing the community tends to illicit a reaction even if the critique is valid and educational. People stop sorting decent critiques from the trolling, which is a true shame.

Technical communities also have one really bad catalyst for really bad reactions: crappy journalists and the trolls that follow them. Apple gets a lot more of this than most, because of the visibility in the mainstream press. Heck, there is even a podcast to point this out (AMB). Apple communities get hit by people trolling on rumors and not actual product releases. My favorite was trolling on the terms of the NDA for the original iPhone SDK and how that would be the policy going forward ("No one can write any books on iPhone Development"). Given this, people don't have infinite patience and don't do real well sorting out the trolls from the legitimate critiques. Fact checking articles about Apple or Linux results in some sad thoughts on the state of tech journalism. Combine that with the absolute lack of proof needed, poor math skills, and the "we have sources" line which seems to be the catch-all for badly sourced articles.

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